Uncharitable Thoughts: Billionaire Challenge

Billionaire Challenge

Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, both billionaires with large charitable foundations, have approached a long list of other billionaires to ask them, too, to donate half their money to charity.

This hasn’t presented me with any particular moral dilemmas. Unless I happen to meet a billionaire in a lift and offer to toss him or her (most likely a him ) double or quits 31 times I’m never going to have my doorbell rung on this account.

But a number of other people have voiced strongly held opinions. And opinions I do have.

Most people, of course, are all in favour of rich people giving away money from their superfluity. Of those who are opposed, some come from the right and some from the left.

From the left, the objection is that if much of the money in the not-for-profit sector comes from very rich people, however well-meaning, there will be distortions in the field. If there is money in investigating malaria, say, and not in dengue fever, then doctors and researchers will drift to malaria studies, and while this is better than having all the doctors and researchers working on shampoos that minimise split ends it is still not as if the decision to concentrate work in this area had been taken by the people affected, or their governments, or the United Nations. The Gates Foundation is a whale among minnows, and it has enormous and unregulated power. If you think it’s a bad idea for individuals to have enormous and unregulated power then you must be hesitant about this – especially as that philanthropy moves money out of the taxed economy to the untaxed economy, reducing the power of government to offer balancing finance.

On the other side of the debate are those who feel that in giving their money out of the corporation, Gates and Buffet are betraying capitalism. T he ideal of capitalism is that it is the invisible hand of market that brings progress. Microsoft, for example, makes computer operating systems, and spends money on making them more and more efficient. This is what Mr Gates has shown himself best at over the years, and it is this progress that makes the world better. If malaria gains, then Microsoft Word loses – there’s less money to fix that irritating glitch that makes large documents crash, and untold millions of Windows users around the world are momentarily incommoded. Anything that slows progress, anything that fetters capitalism, slows down the improvement of the world to the point sometime in the future when we will all be so much richer that all these problems will be trivial to fix.

There are also the moral objections. “Isn’t it just an ego trip?” But then, if you’re going round asking billionaires to give you really have no alternative but to make it public that you’ve given yourself. And “Isn’t it ill-gotten gains, from, for example, Buffet’s profiting from stock market crashes?” Though if you’re willing to take money only from the Mother Theresas of this world you may have difficulty making your fundraising target (and Mother Theresa herself would take money from anybody for her work, crooks not excluded ... and was criticised for that ... it’s complicated).

Looking at the big picture, though, the problem seems to be that people tend to confuse the issues of whether billionaires are a good thing in themselves (probably not) with the proper course of action to take in a world that does in fact have billionaires in it. Bill Gates has enough money to build a small street of suburban houses entirely out of gold bricks and still have enough left over to furnish them from Ikea . I have one gold filling in a left back molar. We can still, however, face some of the same quandaries. How much is enough? Who gets to decide how much is enough? Who has claims on me for the surplus?

Actually, what I think is that if donating a billion dollars to charity gets you anything it gets Bill Gates the right to have me assess his activities on the rather more indulgent criteria I use for my own actions. And if I do that, I have to admit, he’s doing rather better than I am. Which means that the next move is up to me.